dating violence: the video game

Hi everybody!

I've never posted here before, but I thought I'd keep a developer diary here of a project I just started.

some background

A few months ago, Jennifer Ann's Group held a contest to make a Flash game about teen dating violence, that did not contain any violent content. I only heard about the contest about halfway between the contest announcement and the deadline for entries, but I thought it was a fascinating challenge, so I entered.

My approach was to take your typical fairy tale stuff -- a very passive princess finding her prince, having said princess be locked in a dungeon, awaiting rescue -- and turn it all upside down. Have a prince who's a bit of an emotionally abusive jerk, and have the escape from the dungeon, the princess rescuing herself, be a metaphor for escaping from the relationship.

I did almost everything myself: the graphics, the music, the programming. My wife wrote much of the dialogue. I got an entry out on time and won a runner-up prize.

While I'm thrilled that I placed at all, the project was very rushed and I wasn't able to do a fraction of what I wanted. So I want to start over here, and take my time, and deliver a polished, commercial product.

I want to deliver a game with a great story and characters, of course, but on a more personal level, I have two main goals:

• I want to tell the story and develop characters directly through gameplay, i.e. without cutscenes or even very much dialogue. I'll babble about this more in future posts.
• I want to make a game with a strong, dignified female character as the lead, who is not presented as a sex symbol. I find the depiction of women in modern video games to be pretty deplorable.

where I am now

I started learning Torque Game Builder a few years ago, and to be perfectly honest, I didn't like it very much and dropped it fairly quickly. But I'm willing to give it another try, so I'm learning the basics again.

I am presently working on a custom paint program (written in Adobe Flex) to produce watercolor-like graphics; with my Jennifer Ann submission, I had a graphics style that, while reasonably attractive, was very tedious to implement. I'd like to see if I can do things like character animation more efficiently this time around.

I am also working on a general story outline, where the escape-from-the-dungeon is just a small part of a larger story, a way of introducing my lead character. But the outline's only going to take me so far: I don't know at this point what sorts of scenes are going to work, and what sorts of character traits I'm going to be able to express through gameplay.

One thing I'm liking about Torque is that it seems easy to quickly slap an idea up there and see how well it works.

I look forward to learning more about this platform, figuring out how to make compelling products with it, and sharing what I find.